Advanced tools for implementing a systems approach to large-scale flood risk assessment and management

Coping with the complexity of flood risk systems in devising risk reduction strategies is a key challenge in flood risk assessment and management.

A systems approach accounts for the complexity of the flood risk system, including interactions, feedbacks, and dynamic changes along the flood risk chain, and should be applied for large-scale flood risk management planning. Research from the European Training Network System-Risk shows how flood risk assessment and management could benefit from the use of advanced models, tools and datasets.

Key messages of the policy briefing:

• Accounting for system behaviour disentangles complex flooding phenomena.
• Spatial consistency and exploring unprecedented scenarios improve large-scale risk assessments.
• Big data: exploiting large data volumes leads to new insights for risk mapping.

The present policy briefing is one of two papers compiled by adelphi and summarises results from 15 doctoral theses within the System Risk project.